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When Machines Make Our Decisions For Us -- In The Cloud

Microsoft unveiled a new ad a few days ago, showing some advantages of Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant feature, over Apple’s Siri.

Specifically, the ad zeroed in on Cortana’s ability to offer event-driven reminders—for example, when a certain person calls, or when the phone sees that you’re at a specific location.

That ad is pretty straightforward and above board: “Our product is better than their product.” But it’s also lacking on two counts:

First, Cortana is unlikely to be “better” than Siri overall, for no other reason other than Siri has been around for years while Cortana is very new.

Second, the contest isn’t just between Siri and Cortana, but also with Google Now.

These voice-response assistance products are hawked as “neato” conveniences, but consider this: In fact they represent a massive shift in human beings’ relationship to their own brains and to knowledge itself.

Let’s Talk RealityWhen technology does things for people, they forget how to do those things.

A great example is communication: If you wanted to “engage” with someone socially over some distance, you needed to know how to use hot ashes to cure the right kind of feather, then use a quill knife to cut it just right. You needed to know how to dip the quill in ink. And you needed skills related to penmanship and forming thoughts in your head before committing them permanently to paper. Finally, you had to know how to melt the right kind of wax and seal the letter with a special stamp.

Learning these skills today would be a ridiculous waste of time because technology has killed the need for this knowledge.

So what skills will be rendered a ridiculous waste of time by Siri, Cortana and Google Now?

The Devaluation Of Human MemoryIn a few years, the roles and abilities of virtual assistants will be very different than today’s.

For starters, they’ll be able to learn and adapt. Much of that change will be applied to analyzing the big-data details of you and your context. They’ll come to know you better than a human assistant might.

In the same way that you probably already don’t need to remember phone numbers…

You won’t need to remember appointments,

or how you know business contacts.

You won’t have to remember to pick up the laundry: Your assistant will see from your credit card that you dropped it off and remind you to pick it up when you’re near the cleaners.

You won’t have to remember to buy a carton of milk: The fridge will tell your assistant that you’re out and will remind you when you’re in the dairy section of the store.

And you won’t need to know trivia about anything, because the answer is just a question away—ask your phone, your watch, or your glasses.

In short, there are vast swaths of knowledge that will be pointless to possess.

Like the knowledge about how to write a letter with a quill pen and wax seal, much of the everyday knowledge you currently use will be cast into the trash can of uselessness forever.

The Decline In Verbal CommunicationLet’s take a look at two trends, each of which are individually failures, but important in combination.

The first trend is the incredible accuracy, fidelity and miniaturization of in-the-air gesture technology. For example, the Kinect option for Xbox One is incredible technology. The Leap Motion controller is another. This technology is being wasted on a futile and misguided application of sending commands to a computer. But using gestures to control things is not part of the human repertoire of behaviors.

The second trend is the growing market for social networks and messaging apps that don’t require writing or talking—apps like Yo, Emojli and Bolt show that people want to reach out and communicate, but without using words to do it. This is another failed trend because, although people want to communicate without talking, they don’t want to get communication devoid of information.

But when virtual assistants combine these trends, they’ll be able to convert our non-verbal communication into words and actions. When our assistants can instantly understand our frowns, shrugs, nods and head shakes, they’ll be able to do things with that communication in the same way as they do with words.

Here’s A Simple ExampleYour personal assistant vibrates your smartwatch, then speaks into your earpiece, “Excuse me, but John Smith, whom you met today at the conference, is asking if you’d like to have dinner in the hotel restaurant.”

You shake your head, so the assistant says: “I’ll let him know you’re not available.”

Off goes a nicely worded message that says, “I’m sorry, but Mike isn’t available for dinner tonight. Perhaps some other time?”

The End Of PrivacyOur quibbles today with privacy will seem quaint to our future selves.

There will be no privacy, especially about our location. It turns out that location is the Mother of All contextual signals for virtual assistants. By granting permission for apps to know and use our location, our assistants will be much more powerful—and we will be more effective people.

So grant permission we will.

It will become impossible to know who knows your location and what companies are doing with that information. We’ll just assume that everyone knows where we are at all times, unless we go offline deliberately (during which time our virtual assistants will practically be useless).

The Bottom Line It all sounds horrible, right?

But the future always does. These basic changes to our lives are all-but inevitable—and imminent—they won’t be seen as negative, once we see the benefits that virtual assistants bring.

In other words, the new world of virtual assistants will be challenging to adjust to, but we will adjust—and happily.

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Your opening remarks that technology causes us to forget things is a rallying cry of many who incorrectly see technology disconnecting us from reality. But your follow up argument is strong and compelling.

I agree 100%. I look at my own grown children who seldom ‘talk’ on their phones. The use of verbal communication with technology is not something they do first. Instead, they use it only to communicate necessary information that isn’t possible in texting.

Your article makes me think of all those Day Planner companies and products. Your article points out that those were a type of technology as well, designed to allow us to forget things by remember them for us on paper, in a organized method.

Now, those products are obsolete when technology through a virtual digital assistant is able to do all of that for you.

And thank you for addressing the privacy issue, especially with location-based tech. The idea that where we go is secret only to ourselves is a silly notion and it is nice to see you addressing that concern head on.

Are you referring to the absolute lack of information of your whereabouts or the aggregated content of your whereabouts?

Your credit card company has a collection of data points as you travel about, purchases of fuel, food, entertainment, and other retail activities. In addition, which flight you are on when you travel, what car you are using.

Your phone, in constant contact with a cell tower is broadcasting your information to anyone who wants to capture it (with the right technology)

Your car, with its license plate, is captured on every public facing camera, allowing software to scan the number and ID it.

Your face is becoming as trackable, with new software that recognizes you. Your clothing, can disguise you, unless of course you used a credit card to purchase it, which keeps a record tying that piece of clothing specifically to you.

Is it legal for me to hire someone to follow you and report on your whereabouts? A kid on a bike, looking to make some extra money to follow someone around the neighborhood. Is this breaking the law?

So using technology such as the new Hexo+ drone that auto follows can easily report back on physical location.

Like Mike stated, our sense of “privacy” will change drastically once we realize that we aren’t invisible in society and that someone always knows where we are.

Gary Ray:On the plus side, outsourcing “tedious” tasks theoretically opens up ones “mind space” for ever increasing levels of efficiency and complexity. I’m guessing that’s why companies like Google offer such services to their employees. On the down side, we’re not computers, and the dystopia of moving farther away from day to day tasks is likely to warp society even further. We already have a counter movement of mindfulness, learning of “ancient” living skills, and a desire to reject tech and get back to nature (blind dismissal of “GMO” foods). You can also point to the irrationality of mass murders, open carry, indiscriminate hacking and other seemingly mindless activities as a form of insane protest of the marginalization of the individual.

Danita Burkett Zanrė:As someone who is very bad at remembering certain types of things, like taking the laundry out of the dryer (or worse, off of the clothesline), or when I need to have snacks for kids at school, or when senior pictures are due for the yearbook, having technology remind me is actually critical. I do sometimes bemoan the fact that I must really think to do more than 3 or 4 math functions in a row, but I’m not sure that’s entirely due to having a calculator do it for me – could just mean that I’ve gotten older, and in my daily life those things are no longer important. As for things “changing” and new replacing the old, it’s not exactly new, but the changes are faster now. We’ve always abandoned older skills with newer technologies. I’m doing a lot of genealogy right now, and finding ancestors whose occupations were “Pechbrenner” (literally someone who burns pitch out of resin). It was a very important occupation 500 years ago if you wanted to keep your house water tight. I’m not sure that we’re “worse off” for not having that skill any longer. I do believe though that we need to find new ways to stimulate our imaginations and computational skills (we “compute” even when we don’t think we do), in order to keep our minds sharp as technology takes over some of the details.

“When our assistants can instantly understand our frowns, shrugs, nods and head shakes, they’ll be able to do things with that communication in the same way as they do with words.”

There are some really smart people working on artificial affective intelligence, and they are making some inroads. But when you think of how many mistakes we make as humans in reading social cues, trusting a virtual PA isn’t likely to be something we do any time soon. If I shake my head at my husband when he answers the phone he has to rely on ten years of marriage and significant insight into my relationships with people to know if that means “she’s not here right now, call back later” or “I’m sorry – you have the wrong number! Please never call back again…”

It was Plato in his play “Phaedrus” where he presented his own (and Socrates’) views on writing by saying: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

Historically, with each iteration of technology our bit rate of communication has gone up rather than down and our brains have adapted to a more nuanced, semantically dense way of messaging. The future is both scary and a challenge but it only makes us better at communicating not worse.